This Beautiful Future Tickets

By: Rita Kalnejais
Director: Jack Serio
Cast list: Francesca Carpanini (as Elodie), Angelina Fiordellisi (as Angelina), Austin Pendleton (as Austin), Uly Schlesinger (as Otto)
Design: Frank J. Oliva
Lighting: Stacey Derosier
Costume: Ricky Reynoso
Sound: Christopher Darbassie
Other info: Projection design by Lacey Erb

After an acclaimed New York premiere earlier this year, Rita Kalnejais's This Beautiful Future returns off Broadway to the Cherry Lane Theatre. Get This Beautiful Future tickets on TodayTix.

This Beautiful Future is set in German-occupied France during World War II. There, a romance is blossoming between teenagers Elodie and Otto. Their romance has the star-crossed quality of Romeo and Juliet meets Liesl and Rolf of The Sound of Music: Elodie is a French citizen and Otto is a German soldier, indoctrinated into the Nazi party from youth. Elodie knows he's the enemy, but she doesn't realize his personal role in the war's death toll. Likewise, Otto doesn't understand that the real word for the "cleanliness" he and his fellow soldiers are working toward is "genocide." But in an abandoned room, the two are just naive children falling in love for the first time, neither fully understanding how they're being destroyed.

Their story is framed by two older actors, who sit in recording booths and share their memories, their regrets, the ways they wish their lives were different, and the things — like the electricity of first love — they wish they could get back. They also bridge the gap between decades by singing songs from both Elodie and Otto's time, and today. They make This Beautiful Future a play about treasuring life's beautiful moments while we have them, and it urges us to retain some measure of hope even time goes by, people grow older and wiser, and the world turns cruel.

This production of This Beautiful Future off Broadway is only the play's second New York showing, after going up at Theatrelab in January. But it's had an even longer life across the pond. This Beautiful Future had its world premiere in London in 2017 and was revived there in 2021; both productions received critical acclaim. A review of the original production in The Guardian reads, "It reminds us that we all become ghosts of our younger selves who once fizzed with the excitement of being alive and in love. We need to hang on to that feeling: the future may depend on it."

Get tickets to This Beautiful Future in New York on TodayTix.

What to Watch For

• Three of the actors from the first New York production of This Beautiful Future are returning: Tony winner Angelina Fiordellisi, longtime theatre favorite and multi-hyphenate Austin Pendleton, and Francesca Carpanini of the latest All My Sons Broadway revival.
• To write the character of Otto, playwright Rita Kalnejais wanted to authentically capture how young men talk about their heroes. She spoke with a teenage boy about his admiration for the singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran, and she used some of his words verbatim in one of Otto's monologues.
• Kalnejais often writes unorthodox stories of young love and coming of age. Her 2015 play First Love Is the Revolution, about a boy who falls for a fox he was originally planning to hunt, was described in The Guardian as "Romeo and Juliet with fur."
• Kalnejais is also a screenwriter, best known for her 2019 movie Baby Teeth starring Eliza Scanlan.